Psalm 51 is referred to the scandalous affair of King David with Bathsheba (2 Sam 11:1-27), but the psalmist confesses sin as an intrinsic part of his being and the secret heart. In verse 6 he expresses an inner connection between the awareness of the gravity of sin and the underlying belief in God’s righteousness. The bone of contention in interpretation is the mea-ning of the expression lěma‘an tiṣdaq, which is found also in Isa 43:26 and Job 40:8. The common point of all three passages is the belief that Israel and humanity can never be in the right before God. God is in the right in any trial, whatever Israel’s judgment on God and God’s dealing with his people. In this exploration of the meaning of Ps 51:6 we deal with the issue of the relationship between God’s judgment on sin in terms of sentence of condemnation and his exalted majesty which is at work beyond the domain of sin. We confront the justification of God’s judgment with the basic meaning of the word ṣdq in relation to God’s righteousness, which implies the certitude that God was always compassionate and faithful towards the sinful covenant people. The basic methodological consideration is the question of what can and what cannot be deduced from the texts about the interaction of judgment and grace from the context of the psalm, of the Letter of Paul to the Romans 3:4, and from the broadest context of the Bible.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36740141
Any intent to investigate the concept of justice in all dimensions implies cross-comparison of the concept on diachronic and synchronic levels in relation to various religions and cultures. The comparative question includes those things which are identical or common on the one hand and those things which are similar but uncommon and always distant on the other. Whatever the resemblance between representations of justice in polytheistic, pantheistic and monotheistic cultures in categories such as motifs, vocabulary, imagery and literary structures may be, there is an essential difference on ontological grounds. Within the Jewish-Christian religion and culture the reference is not primarily to formal cosmic and social order but, with pressing insistence, to moral sense as manifested in human characters and in interpersonal relations. The complex notion of justice indicates that there are two interdependent dimensi-ons of justice: the justice of the soul within the human personality and the justice of the community as the symbol of a relationship within society. Here we shall deal with the basic meaning of the concept of justice in classical cultures of antiquity by placing each tradition in the context of its basic perception of the world, of humans and of God.
COBISS.SI-ID: 10178051
The monograph Justice and Redemption: Anthropological Realities and Literary Visions by Ivan Cankar is Dr Irena Avsenik Nabergoj’s third English-language monograph on the work of Ivan Cankar (1876−1918), the greatest Slovenian writer. After Mirror of Reality and Dreams: Stories and Confessions by Ivan Cankar (2008), which deals with Cankar’s moral and social criticism, and The Power of Love and Guilt: Representations of the Mother and Woman in Literature by Ivan Cankar (2013), which presents Cankar’s works about his mother and women, the author’s new book speaks about Cankar’s concept of anthropological reality and his vision of justice and redemption. This vision is, as is evident in the author’s poetry, prose fiction and dramatic creations, in tune with Cankar’s increasingly powerful experienc-ing and reinventing of injustice of all types; as Cankar grew older, these aspects of his writing became more pronounced, and ultimately they were transformed into symbolic images of re-demption in the hereafter that follows all the injustices suffered on earth. The book presents Cankar’s idea of justice by comparing it with similar presentations of the same in selected works by William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky and Ger-hart Hauptmann. In searching for Cankar’s sincerity in examining his own views on justice or injustice the author compares Cankar’s autobiographical works with those of Saint Augustine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Janez Trdina.
COBISS.SI-ID: 37640749